The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's E-Mails ... “I was not aware of the proposal that he speak to me until this email exchange was released, but in any case we never spoke,” ... In each of the Clinton e-mail releases, the question has been whether improper influence filtered through this circle, in particular from the Clinton Foundation. In this week’s batch, the headlines came from an exchange between Abedin and Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, who was trying to get a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent named Gilbert Chagoury, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, access to the State Department. “We need Gilbert chagoury to speak to the substance person re lebanon,” Band wrote to Abedin. “As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in lebanon. Very imp.” Abedin replied that the right person was a Lebanon policy expert named Jeffrey Feltman and said, “I’ll talk to Jeff.” The exchange might have ended here, but Band wrote back. “Better if you call him,” he said. “Now preferable. This is very important. He’s awake I’m sure.” Celebrities and power brokers genuflected to Abedin, but Band was sure he could lean on her. The most interesting words Band deployed were the simplest ones: “we” and “us.” In a sense, they contained the essence of the many Clinton e-mail investigations: Whom did the Secretary of State’s senior staff understand to be within the bounds of that “we”? But when news organizations tracked down Feltman there was a delicious turn. The State Department’s Lebanon expert had never heard about Chagoury from Abedin or anyone else. “I was not aware of the proposal that he speak to me until this email exchange was released, but in any case we never spoke,” he told CNN. Band, in trying to take advantage of the social dynamics around the Secretary of State, had misunderstood their nature, and had promised access he couldn’t give. He thought he was the heavy, and Abedin the functionary, but maybe it was the other way around. In the e-mails around Clinton, there is a constant, low-amplitude, transactional scurry: of older people for an audience, and of younger people for a position.